Chevalier weaves intriguing tale of 15th-century tapestries

JEANNETTE J. LEEAssociated Press

Published Friday, February 20, 2004

Six tapestries cover the walls of a circular room in Paris' Museum of the Middle Ages. Each features a unicorn and a bejeweled lady against a backdrop teeming with animals and an array of flowering plants.

"The Lady and the Unicorn." By Tracy Chevalier. Dutton. 250 Pages. $23.95.

No one knows who created or commissioned the intricate 15th-century textiles.

There is also no agreement about what the entire series symbolizes. Two of the most plausible theories are put forward by Tracy Chevalier in her novel "The Lady and the Unicorn."

Scholars generally agree that five of the tapestries represent the senses -- taste, touch, smell, sound and sight. But the sixth remains a mystery.

It is called "A mon seul desir" -- "My soul's desire" -- for the writing woven above the woman's head. With this tapestry starting the series, she appears to seduce or tame the unicorn. But place the tapestry at the end of the series and she seems to bid farewell to each sense in a Christian renunciation of physical needs.

As she did in her best-selling novel "Girl With a Pearl Earring" (1999), Chevalier imagines the long-lost history and humanity behind works of art. The travails of life -- loveless marriages, the search for God and physical infirmity -- surround the tapestries and bring them meaning.

In Chevalier's fictional account, the Le Viste family hires Nicolas des Innocents, an arrogant and lecherous, but essentially goodhearted, Parisian painter to design weavings for their banquet hall.

Chevalier matches the psychology of the tapestries with des Innocents. He is the unicorn, and the women he encounters -- young girls and their protective mothers -- become women in the tapestries.

Through des Innocents, Chevalier shows that the sensual and spiritual messages of the tapestries can coexist. His somewhat altruistic seduction of the weaver's blind daughter, Alienor, contains strong Christian iconography. And des Innocents eventually discovers that "plowing" a woman (as he calls it) is not fulfilling without mutual love.

"I went with other women, but none satisfied me," he says. "Each time I finished feeling I was not completely emptied, like a mug with a mouthful of beer still left at the bottom."

Chevalier's rendering of a weaver's workshop in Brussels and the several stages of tapestry-making demonstrate her meticulous research. She manages to develop character while dropping simple technical tidbits.

"Warp threads are thicker than the weft, and made of coarser wool as well," the weaver's wife says, "I think of them as like wives. Their work is not obvious -- all you can see are the ridges they make under the colorful weft threads. But if they weren't there, there would be no tapestry."

Each chapter is narrated by a single character, yet Chevalier uses little in the way of word choice, sentence structure or tone to distinguish among them. The result is a book that often seems to be told by the same speaker rather than many individuals, relegating several of the characters to the second dimension. Des Innocents, the central character, is an exception.

"The Lady and the Unicorn" is a quick and straightforward, but by no means frivolous, read. The book is simple and likable, and readers will benefit from Chevalier's research of the period.